Browse Advertising

Counting Down the Top Eccentrics of San Francisco

Even as huge swaths of San Francisco are gentrified in a trend the Chris Daly camp warns will price out the very people who gave the city its flavor, these folks are holding on (one of them BARTs in each day from the East Bay), reminding us that no matter how many high-rise condos go up in the city, we won't turn into Orange County anytime soon.

At SF Weekly, we take journalism seriously without getting stuffy about it, make sardonic wit and literary style weekly occurrences, and absolutely cherish political independence. We can inveigh against the Total Information Awareness mindset of the Bush administration, and then,...

Residencies by local indie-rock and pop bands, however, haven't quite taken hold in San Francisco like they have in other cities, despite efforts from clubs over the years. But now they are gaining traction.

San Francisco's biennial homeless count has long been used as an indicator of how well the city is dealing with homelessness, which would all be fine and good, if it weren't for one small and inconvenient fact for everyone involved: It is a meaningless charade.

There's something to be said for exploiting the process of issuing building permits for squeezing public amenities like parks from companies. But in San Francisco, participants in these sorts of tactics sometimes lose sight of all that's at stake.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently floated the idea of building prisons in Mexico to house the 18,000 California inmates who are in the country illegally. We have to wonder: Could a jailbird's mom visit him in Tijuana? Because if she's undocumented, she can't do that here.

San Francisco poured millions into the event in hopes of catching crumbs off the table of a megalomaniacal billionaire. New Zealand, meanwhile, directly subsidized its yachting team with government funds, buying something akin to partial ownership of the product. These were calculated risks. Neither may pay off.

We could have called this "The Travel Issue," but mere travel is not what we were after. We wanted to go beyond the two-dimensional, picture-postcard experience of tourism to something deeper — a voyage out in space and back in time. A place where origins and destinations meet.

So many times, we've been told that tragedies or deaths "put things in perspective" when it comes to organized sports. Really? Fans need floods and famines and terrorist attacks and senseless mayhem to remind them that there are more important things in life than the outcome of a ballgame? This is necessary?